Some Recent Cheong Gye Cheon Images
June 28, 2010 § 4 Comments
Visitors crossing stepping stone bridge across Seoul's Cheong Gye Cheon creek
One of L.A. Creek Freak’s perenial favorite posts is our earlier coverage of the Cheong Gye Cheon stream project in downtown Seoul, South Korea. It’s an impressive project where a visionary mayor lead the charge to remove a freeway in order to daylight the historic creek where the city of Seoul began. Sounds familiar, no?
My good friend Paul is living is Seoul and sends these photos. This excellent project can serve as an example to L.A.’s Creek Freaks about the transformative power of creek daylighting and river revitalization.
Cool shady seating areas under bridges. Seems like L.A.'s bridges' undersides are more designed for homeless folks and trolls to hang out. Perhaps we should be designing welcoming sites like this?
The revitalized Cheong Gye Cheon is one of the most popular spots in all of Seoul - for both locals and tourists.
Signature bridges cross at street-level above the below-grade river walk.
Another shot of the stepping stone bridge across the Cheong Gye Cheon. Probably impossible to permit in California... but a guy can dream, no?
One indicator animal for healthy streams: fish have returned. Looks like a carp, though, perhaps not the highest value fish, but I bet even these stayed away from the stream when it was buried beneath a road and a freeway.
To read more about and see more photos of the Cheong Gye Cheon project, please go to L.A. Creek Freak’s earlier article Daylighting in the Heart of Seoul: The Cheong Gye Cheon Project. (All photos by Paul Bournhonesque – also read his feature-length comments on the earlier post.)
[Lastly, some thrilling alternate spellings of Cheong Gye Cheon, so persnickety exacting computer searches can find us: Cheongyecheon, Cheonggyecheon, Cheonggyecheong, Cheongyecheong, Cheong Gye Cheong ]
L.A. Creek Freak 
[…] no completion of the proposed Arroyo Seco bike trail just yet, or anything as visionary as this converted wash in Seoul, South Korea. Just more cement, because there wasn’t enough there already. On the […]
Can one ride a bike on the path?
I don’t think that one can – but, soon, we plan to feature Paul’s photos of some other great Korean river bikeways – including the Han River in Seoul.
actually, there is a section of the 청겨천 (cheong gye cheon), down stream from where these picture were taken, where bikes are allowed on a bike path. the pictured section is toward the “head waters” where bikes would be impossible to accommodate as it is in a very high density area.
the bike path portion downstream connects to a very extensive, and constantly growing river and creek bike path system. there are miles and miles of waterway bike exclusive paths running parallel to pedestrian exclusive paths.